Talk:MEIKO/@comment-47.184.17.156-20190530042648/@comment-53539-20190530065316
This has been asked before and we can confirm that Meiko and Kaito are both due an update, we just haven't heard anything for a while. Studios can take a while to develop vocals. One thing to consider is that the update could have been for V4, in which case some things would have to be reset. It shouldn't be as bad as Meiko and Kaito V2, which had to be overhauled greatly due the major differences between V2 vocals and V3 ones. In the case of V5... There isn't much difference that great between V3 and V5 Japanese voicebanks except for minor things overall such as modern technological advancements. CFM has not confirmed either if they adopted the new recording technique from Internet co., Ltd. That may seem something you would consider they'd automatically adopt, but CFM has their own set of development techniques they've always used and they work to their own standard. If they did adopt it, then the problem is they would have to re-record all of each Vocaloids library. For CFM as well, its argued if you need to really use the new technique due to their vocaloids being older then V4... Older Vocaloids sometimes don't see a great deal of updates, for example Gumi Natives more or less been cleaned up each generation since V2 with, and her V3 version just added the missing triphones (they didn't even need the producer back in the studio for this either). In addition, the recent Sora function freebie that Ah Software confirmed that for 6 months there was no developers environment for V5. With an update to either Kaito or Meiko, an update to Piapro Studio likely will come, and that update has been delayed for 6 months before it could even begin. As you can sell, we're in a great deal of mystery about what actually is going on overall and all we have is the knowledge that their coming. But... CFM may take until next year for all we know to show up a Vocaloid, they were very late into V3 releasing their first Vocaloid for that engine, even though they were early in V2 and V4. Their pretty unreliable when it comes to predicting whats going to happen. In addition, they confirmed they were still working on giving Luka Appends. There is also likely to be in here somewhere a update to Miku because Miku is going to be a priority update due to the fact she is responsible for selling up to 1/5 of all sales related to Vocaloid. Edit: A voicebank for Japanese can take between 2-8 months depending on how much care their taking. She has 3 voicebanks, so thats at least 6 months they've got on the table. CFM doesn't take too long to produce their vocals as their in house... And quite frankly... CFM doesn't spend months making sure their vocals are the highest quality of all of Vocaloid, and they are known to cheat or take corners in the past. So at best I'd say they take 3 or 4 months per vocal, based on their timeframe from starting the Kagamine project to completely it especially since there isa month or two before they release the product when its done... (Its not like the Zero-G vocals where upon being given the "okay", they just release them immediately, Japanese Vocaloids can be done for up to 6 months before they get finally released). They more or less just have to tweak old voicebanks via glitch fixing and do things like re-do bad samples. The voicebank like to kill months of work is the English vocal, as that likely has to be re-done from scratch as CFM developed a new approach with Miku V4 that wasn't applied to previous Vocaloids. And an English vocal... They take between 4 months up to a year and a half to complete in comparison, with the native English voicebanks tending to be the ones that are done within the shortest amount of time (since they don't have to worry about a lot of problems with a non-native accent and know what English sounds like), and the Japanese vocals being the ones that take at least a year at times to complete (welcome to the world of producing a non-native English voicebank when you yourself don't speak English much at all, which is the problem most Japanese studios have faced so far). Again, all this amounts to speculation as there isn't much to go by at this stage on what their up to. I just thoughts I'd add bit on the development times. Edit: Also, one minor note I almost forget entirely, with Piapro Studio, there is a possibility that not only do they have to fix the fact it only half works within V5, but they likely are considering new functions specifically for each Vocaloid. IT may not be EVEC, it may be something else. Though EVEC was confirmed to work best with professional singers, which is why Luka had so much to her EVEC and the other two CFM didn't really... Luka's provider is a amateur singer, while the Kagamines and Miku are voice actors. Luka's provider can actually sing, while the other two providers can't. Of course as professionals, Meiko and Kaito can sing better then Luka so likely will have a bit of experimentation of some form going on. Quite frankly, I'd be disappointed myself if CFM didn't include. Okay I really can't think of what else to write to note except that you need to be patient. With this much unknown factors, we don't even know if any of the CFM are coming out this year and I myself wouldn't be surprised if the first CFM came out next year for V5. The reason Luka V4 came out soon is they pretty much dumped V3 and just kept 3 voicebanks... Possibly just 2 if Soft and Hard are tweaked versions of 1 single voicebank. Those voicebanks were basically doubles to make 6... There was an AWFUL lot of cheap cheating with Luka. You paid for a empty package which gave the impression of there being a lot to it... But there really wasn't, even if you included EVEC. Its why I don't understand Luka V4x fans sprint to defend it, CFM's weakest era thus far to me is V4. In addition to a empty Luka release we got a basic Kagamine release and everything went into Miku again with V4x and English being about the best they had to offer. This is why CFM aren't my favourite company. CFM fanboys always rush to give CFM the highest praise of all of Vocaloid... But there just is better voicebanks out there and more effort was likely put into Vocaloids like LUMi. There was even suspected samples from English Luka re-used for the Kagamine English as there just are many samples that behave just like hers and at least we can confirmed the English Kagamines are pathetic, this despite "Soft" Luka English was proven just to be a re-harsh of her other English voicebank since they both had identical bugs. Thats all I can think to add really to this and that last paragraph is my personnel set of annoyances at this company. I don't think much of CFM and I wish they'd abandon certain practices. But Saying that... We know Internet borrows samples to make voicebanks complete, and Internet is a better company overall and produced possibly the best Vocaloid of V4 as well as their best voicebanks when they tossed out Otomachi Una.